I Saw The Old Approaching

Another old/new manifesto, this time the epigraph of David Edgerton’s terrific, game-changing book The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900:

I stood on a hill and I saw the Old approaching,
but it came as the New.
It hobbled up on new crutches which no one had ever seen before
and stank of new smells of decay which no one had ever smelt before.
–Bertolt Brecht, “Parade of the Old New,” 1939.

Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.